So, I've been working on making my entry for LD#23 better since it was just dreadful as a game, but interesting as a proof of concept. Anyway, I realized that my choice of font is probably one that I'm not entitled to use in anything that might be considered 'commercial' and I was thinking of putting it up on the Android Market if I could get it working well enough.

Anyway, my question is whether anyone happens to know of Fonts that are available for commercial use or failing that an inexpensive (Read free) program for creating fonts?

If you get it from site which screaming free fonts, they're free to use.

A lot of "free font" sites have rip-offs of popular fonts (LOTR, GoldenEye, etc), which is obviously not legit, and even many of the so-called "free" fonts have varying licenses.

For example, some will only be licensed for personal or non-commercial use. Others will forbid any sort of modification or embedding (i.e. creating and distributing it as a bitmap font is sketchy ground).

In general, if a font's license isn't clear on a "free font" site, I'd just find a different font.

Under U.S. law, the finding of Eltra Corp v. Ringer is that you cannot copyright the appearance of a typeface. A font however is an implementation of a typeface, and is as copyrightable as any other code. This doesn't pertain to "trade dress" issues pertaining to a product that uses those fonts, so a newspaper using the NYT's exact typefaces and layout could still get sued into oblivion, but not over the typefaces alone.

Mind you this is U.S. law -- some other countries do allow typefaces to be copyrighted. And of course a lot of the "free font" sites aren't using anything like copied typefaces, they're just giving away commercial fonts. Stick to the vast library of truly free fonts out there.

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